Darkhan: the third largest city in Mongolia, home to just under 100,000 inhabitants, is a true reflection of the internationalism of the Soviet Union. Although not officially part of the Soviet Union, the socialist Mongolian People’s Republic, which existed from 1924 to 1992, was by all measures a Soviet state. Society was modelled on the same systems of the Soviet Union, and almost its economy was entirely dependent on Soviet subsidies. The city of Darkhan, built in 1961, was masterminded by Comecon, the Soviet-led body for economic cooperation between the socialist states of the world, and its development mainly funded by the Soviet Union, with thousands of experts from Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia being brought in to design the city. Darkhan, a dimple on an otherwise smooth Mongolian landscape, typifies how life in the border communities of the Soviet Union was shaped by its legacy. Its connection to Russia, just a two hour drive from the border, made it a Soviet outpost in an otherwise empty, undisturbed landscape. Its colourful Soviet apartment blocks, stacked in rows, stand out eerily as they stop abruptly at certain points, giving way to the endless miles of grassy fields and mountains that exist here as a right.
Initially a stop on the Trans-Mongolian Railway, which was built to connect Mongolia to Russia and China, Darkhan became chosen as a site to expand Mongolia’s industry and provide investment away from the capital Ulaanbaatar. It reflected the Soviet Union’s interest in organising and industrialising the ‘backwater’ parts of its sphere, as it was already doing in the Central Asian Republics. Darkhan became a hub for producing cement, wood, lime and steel as well as food processing and textiles. It was built so that its residents lived upwind from the factories, protecting them from air pollution. Buses took the workers from the residential area to the factory, and after the day was over dropped them off at two big stores which provided the population with the commodities they needed. This system transformed life in Mongolia; from its traditional agrarian patterns of living, where people lived dispersed as animal-herders, living in ‘yurts’ – traditional circular tents adapted for the steppe climate.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, however, brought about an end to Mongolia’s emerging Soviet society. Now cut off from funds provided by the Soviet Union, and with a hard economic border with Russia to contend with, Mongolia quickly fell into an economic tailspin. Its GDP collapsed, inflation shot up and a huge budget deficit was created by the need for borrowing. Mongolia accepted that it would need to transition to a market economy to survive. Although not officially part of the Soviet Union, Darkhan was very much a Soviet city, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and its other satellite states threatened its existence; as the markets it exported its goods to disappeared. Many of its factories shut down, and workers were made unemployed. Faced with such immediate hardship, people had to find other means to survive. The most popular solution was a return to the past – with people setting up yurt communities on the outskirts of the city and returning to pastoral living. This was not only a necessity, but also a desirable outcome for people, as the collapse of socialism created the opportunity for people to reclaim their traditional identity. Yurt living became a popular choice promoted by the governor of the region, and the government spent 40 million tugriks, around 50 thousand in dollars, to help 250 families buy agricultural seeds to grow crops.
It was also economic sense for people to move into the yurts. Under the Soviet system, apartment rent made up roughly 20% of people’s income, one of the highest proportions in the Soviet world, but in the yurts, people only had to pay for electricity, making up only 1% of their income. These advantages meant that the yurts became a trend, and eventually 10% of the city’s population were living in yurt communities on the outskirts. There are, however, two sides to this story. Whilst the collapse of the Soviet Union gave people the opportunity to reclaim an inherent part of their history, there were also parts of Soviet life that people could not live without. Before Mongolia was controlled by the Soviets, it had for centuries been under the yolk of Chinese interests. There was very little in the way of societal structure, with most of the population classed as serfs, and economic trade was dominated by Chinese companies. This meant that Mongolia was fundamentally an extremely underdeveloped country, there was nothing resembling an organised, modern society which the Mongolian government could fall back on in the absence of Soviet support.
To build from scratch, however, required some frameworks to base the new Mongolia on, frameworks left behind by the legacy of the Soviet Union. Economically, recovery was built on industry. The Darkhan region made a significant recovery after the chaos of the 1990s, with its GDP steadily growing from 2000 to 2016, with the exception of a sharp decline in 2009 due to the global financial crash. As Mongolia connected to new markets, industry started running again in Darkhan. Industry and construction has remained a significant part of Darkhan’s economy, making up around 40% of its economic output consistently through the 200s and 2010s. Economic recovery has also been helped by the untapped reserves of natural resources such as coal, iron and gold, which has become a key part of Mongolia’s economy. Just outside of Darkhan the mining town of Sharyn Gol provides coal for Darkhan’s thermal power plant. The end of Soviet support caused production at the mine to collapse, but plans for modernisation and expansion have revived its prospects, with the company in charge hoping to return production back to Soviet levels.
Another area where the Soviet legacy has persisted is in education. The Soviets brought a comprehensive five-stage education system to Mongolia, from kindergartens to higher education facilities, breaking up local patterns of agrarian living, and bringing people into a more modern society. The cessation of Soviet support once again created a crisis, as it seemed inevitable that people would go back to their traditional ways of life. Indeed, by the early 2000s, up to three quarters of rural children were dropping out of school. To tackle this, a privatisation scheme was established to rebuild Mongolia’s education system, with a focus on higher education. Old Soviet colleges merged and became new private universities. Like in the Soviet era, however, courses remain largely technical and vocational, with an emphasis on subjects such as life sciences, engineering and land surveillance. It shows how Mongolia is still reliant on the technical and scientific developments that had been brought by the Soviets such as the modernisation of agriculture or the expansion of mining.
Once a railway and road hub connecting Mongolia to the Soviet Union, Darkhan is now isolated from its new neighbour, Russia. Yet here, like in Narva and Ivangorod, cross-border activity has continued, particularly with Mongolians running trade across the border. Just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, one enterprising resident brought in European cars from Russia to sell to other locals. He would drive for 18 gruelling days with the cars attached to one another, and pay the Russian police bribes to get back across the border. This budding entrepreneurialism brought back the tradition of the 18th and 19th century caravan trade, when lone traders would traverse the steppes of Central Asia, with camels linked in a chain, to sell their goods in faraway destinations. Times have changed however, and where there were once camels carrying jewels and rich materials across the steppes, there are now trailer cars pulling along knock-off goods. It’s what people have to survive off of.
Ultimately, he Darkhan of today remains something of a Soviet relic; found hidden in the endless Mongolian steppes. For the inhabitants of this isolated city, the Soviet era brought an order and security to life which has been necessary to maintain. Despite the initial move back to more traditional communities living in yurts, the large majority of people living in Darkhan have sought to preserve their old way of life. It is not a surprise: as although the yurts have proven to be a cost-effective way of living, they lack appropriate sanitary conditions and have led to an increased exposure to disease. Indeed, Darkhan shows us an image of a modern Mongolia, transformed by the Soviet system. It is now, however, stalled in uncertainty as the artery that once pumped the blood it needed to move forward has been cut off, leaving Darkhan as an odd fragment on the broken borders of the Soviet Union.
Leave a Reply